still confused

[marcicat]

Last Friday I went to a work seminar about “trust.” It was great, in the sense that I got paid for 45 minutes of sitting quietly and not being too obviously distracted. But honestly, I didn’t get it.

The speaker kept talking about trust like it was a yes/no question — you either trust someone, or you don’t. And that just doesn’t make sense to me. Trust is like the space-time continuum — super important, broadly governed by a complex set of sometimes-conflicting principles, everybody knows it exists but hopes they don’t get called in in class to explain it.

There are coworkers I would trust not to be lying if they said there was free food in the kitchen (many). And there are coworkers I would trust to give them my keys and have them turn on my car to warm it up in the winter (few). But it’s all relative.

In conclusion: while I understand the desire to simplify complex concepts into an uncontroversial 45-minute presentation, over-simplifying can make the concepts impossible to relate to, calling into question whether the presentation ever had any value at all.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.